Berkeley Taxpayers To Pay for Sex-change? Financially Strapped SF School District Loans Money to Radio Station

Berkeley Taxpayers To Pay for Sex-change Surgery?

A proposal that would cover the cost of sex-change operations for city employees in Berkeley is set for a City Council vote Tuesday night.

Berkeley health insurance providers Kaiser Permanente and Health Net don't pay for gender-reassignment surgery under the city's current health plans. The City Council proposal would set aside an annual $20,000 fund for the procedure for city employees.

The benefit would allow employees to collect the money before the sex-change operation, which can cost up to $50,000. The money would be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis each year.

To receive a payout from the fund, employees would have to have lived as the opposite sex for at least one year and undergone hormone therapy. They also would have to have worked for the city at least a year.

And here I thought California's economy was in trouble!

In a related story, San Francisco School district loans money to radio station:

SAN FRANCISCO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT noncommercial KALW/SAN FRANCISCO is receiving a loan of up to $200,000 from the school district to keep the station operating through financial difficulties. The SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE reports that the board voted unanimously to provide the station with a line of credit, despite financial woes for the school system itself.

These are your tax dollars at work, friends. Those of you outside of California should be bailing us out any time now, since we represent the acme of fiscal responsibility.

And I mean "Acme" in the full Wile E. Coyote/ Roadrunner sense of the word!

Cross posted at LCR.

Environmentalists Breed Cow That Bites Back

Houston: Cattle growers are more than a little nervous about a project funded by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) carried out by researchers at UC Berkeley.

"I see nothing wrong with bio-engineering as long as the results are favorable," said chief research fellow Dr. Irvine M. Kidding. "We are expecting a breakthough to be coming almost any day now".

All I can say is: "Wow!"

Update: Welcome to all you from The PETA Files! Glad you stopped by!

Just Desserts, or "I Wasn't Expecting to Meet my 72 Virgins Just Yet!"

Apparently, we have the technology to track incoming mortar rounds and zero in return fire in as little as two to three shots. From the time this guy fired his first shot, he had about twelve seconds to live.

He was praying to meet his God and the Marines were there to make the travel arrangements!

Update: There seems to be a large consensus that this is a video of incompetence rather than accuracy. It is true that if the mortar becomes too hot through rapid fire, a round can cook off in the tube. (Wasn't there a scene in We Were Soldiers, where Lt. Col Hal Moore had his men urinating on a mortar tube to cool it down?)
But, whether little Johnny Jihadist killed himself through his own carelessness or was a victim of return fire, there is one less jihadist in world, who was not expecting to meet his 72 virgins just yet!

H/T The Blog Prof
Cross posted at Say Anything

House Passes Measure to Regulate TV Commercials

Have you heard about this? Congress is considering a bill introduced last year, sponsored by Anna Eschoo, a California Democrat, with 63 co-sponsors, to regulate how loud TV commercials can be! The act is called CALM (for the laid back California lifestyle I presume!), the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation.

Apparently, this intrusion into your bedroom (you do have a TV in the bedroom, don't you?) was passed last Tuesday on a voice vote.

Having apparently solved all of the problems of the economy, world peace, health care, and man's inhumanity to man, Congress turns its unwavering eye towards the millions of Americans without a mute button on their remote or TiVo. Finally!

Your tax dollars at work.

Cross posted at Say Anything

Update: Brent Bozell had this:

In fact, Eshoo’s bill may be nothing more than well, noise. It doesn’t really change anything that wasn’t already changing. Her bill originally demanded that television advertisements could be no louder than the average maximum loudness of the programs they accompany. She changed her bill to instead adopt guidelines already being developed by the TV industry, which she said will accomplish the same goal. Given the industry’s similar promises to develop standards to curb indecency, we can all begin to laugh (quietly) now.

Yeah. This merits Congressional attention!